Hedge funds control free markets

I have wanted to do this for some time now, but it seems each week some other topic pushes this one aside.

Hedge funds are simply large – no, huge is a better term – piles of money. The very rich and very large institutions, like pension funds and banks, give billions of dollars to a "money manager" to play with. These funds aren’t used to produce anything. They are mainly for the manipulation of markets.

Hedge funds are the least regulated of all money institutions. That in itself is scary because when we deregulated the savings and loan industry, greed cost the taxpayer, you and me, in the neighborhood of $750 billion. Then, when we deregulated the banking industry, it cost us, the taxpayers, $500 billion to save banks from their own greed. This was the recent sub-prime mortgage fiasco. And of course the sub-prime problem not only cost taxpayers, it also cost home owners a number too large to write in this space, in lost home value.